HBO Premieres Its Documentary on Vogue’s Fashion Editors

On Tuesday night at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where Renoirs, Manets, and Courbets usually command attention, a heretofore unsung group of artists received their due recognition. Vogue’s fashion editors, accustomed to working behind the scenes to achieve iconic photographs, found themselves fielding questions in front of the flashbulbs at the premiere screening of HBO’s documentary In Vogue: The Editor’s Eye. “It’s very important, the fact that these people and the work that they do has been archived,” Grace Coddington, one of the eight editors profiled, said of her colleagues, each of whom has imbued the pages of the 120-year-old publication with her own singular sensibility. “I was actually having a conversation with Grace about what makes a Vogue shoot special this weekend at my house in Nashville,” said model and chanteuse Karen Elson, in ladylike, lace-edged Marc Jacobs. “It’s the quality—the quality of the fashion editors. There’s an eye. What can I say?” DesignerVera Wang, without skipping a beat, offered her own catchphrase: “It’s Vogue-speak,” the former Vogue staffer affirmed. “There is a connection and a common vocabulary and culture that just happens to work for all of us.” Indeed, as fashion industry stalwarts ranging from actresses Sarah Jessica Parkerand Christina Ricci to models Karlie Kloss and Joan Smalls to designers Donna Karan and Jason Wucrossed the red carpet, everyone seemed to be speaking the same language. “A Vogue image is something that makes you gasp,” model Elettra Wiedemann, in sleek neoprene Cushnie et Ochs, offered. “It’s surprising, classic, and beautiful, without fail.”

Post-screening, amid the soaring skylights and stained glass windows of the museum’s Charles Englehard Court, the subject of beauty was still fresh on everyone’s mind as champagne corks popped. “For anyone who loves fashion, the challenge of making things beautiful every day is exciting to see,” writer and Vogue Contributing Editor Marina Rust (in her trademark mix of Dries Van Noten and Marni) remarked of the film. For his part, codirector Fenton Bailey was caught off-guard by the process. “All of my preconceptions were shattered. It’s more like alchemy—it’s sort of invisible. Which isn’t to say that it isn’t extraordinary; you just can’t point your camera at it.” But Bailey and his codirector Randy Barbato have, and the result is eye candy with insight. “What makes an image Vogue?” former Vogue fashion editor Carlyne Cerf de Dudzeele pondered. “Talent. Energy. It needs to be done with love.” International Editor at Large Hamish Bowles perhaps put it most poetically: “A Vogue image holds a mirror up to its time, and you really have a strong sense of what that moment meant.”